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Bring back pop-up headlights! That's right—pop up headlights were the closest artifact we had to match the wedge-shaped future we were promised. The first headlight popped up on the 1936 Cord 810 and the last on the 2004 Corvette and Lotus Espirit, and they still hold a certain fascination to this day. Pop-up headlights, for all of their inherent complexities, were one of those period-correct features that were lauded as Space-Age futurism, made it huge in the Eighties, defined a generation of car design, and fell into equal parts obscurity, datedness, and pedestrian safety standards. They are cool. When those headlights rise up from out of seemingly nowhere, you know the car and the driver meant business. (Or, at the very least, that it was getting dark out.)
Sure, they were unaerodynamic—Corvette engineers figured that the "air brakes," they derided, were slowing down the C5 Corvette by as much as ten miles per hour. But hey, The C5 Corvette looks like a sad frog with its lights up, anyway.
As does the Ferrari 456, and the second-generation Ford Probe, as most rounded Nineties sports cars. There's a reason they died out. There's no reason why they can't make a wonderfully retro comeback.
This has got to be one of the most ambitious projects ever committed to YouTube: one man's obsessive quest to track down every single car that ever popped a headlight. Or lowered a shutter, as on the Alfa Romeo Montreal. Or, dropped its lights from the grille, as on the first-generation Chevrolet Camaro. (For a few brief years in the Sixties, GM engineering must have dropped the equivalent of Norway's GDP on hidden headlight research and development.)
"There's just something so iconic about it," says the YouTuber known as Rockstar Rides, who was able to track down of all things a Matra Murena, a TVR 280i, numerous obscure Lamborghinis, a dreadful Ford Probe, and not one but two Vectors. Check out the Cizeta-Moroder's twin sets of pop-ups! How about the Opel GT's frog-eyed, thoroughly mechanical CA-CHUCK? Peep the three Lamborghini Jalpas who made a valiant attempt. What's cooler than a lit-up Countach? Or a Testarossa?
Our favorite, however, is still the Porsche 928's enclosed pods. Frog eyes never had it so good.
